School classes need to return as much as possible next week

Northern Ireland has been in and out of lockdown now for most of the last year.

Massive damage has been done to the economy. Many thousands of people have lost their jobs and whole business sectors have been harmed, with many individual enterprises ruined.

Untold mental health damage has been done to society, particularly those who find it harder to isolate than others, because they have fewer social contacts or networks.

Elderly people have in many cases been deprived of the one of their last sources of pleasure, contact with their families and loved ones.

There are powerful arguments that this ‘cure’ is worse than Covid-19 itself, which overwhelmingly affects the very elderly. But there are also powerful arguments that cracking down hard on the virus is better in the long run because a period of sacrifice and deprivation gets us more quickly to a normal society and a functioning economy.

Few people think the choices facing politicians are easy, particularly when most establishment scientists (by no means all) are telling them that the disaster will follow a failure to go into lockdown.

But the evidence in favour of school closures is highly uncertain and the scientists are far from unanimous. They recognise the damage done to children from missing class.

Pupils were out of school from March until September. They had an extended break at Halloween. Some schools then closed for Christmas early.

Peter Weir has been right to try to get schools back as much as possible next week. In particular exam years need to return. If not, children suffer, most of all the poorest ones.

Young people are almost never badly hit by Covid, and the youngest among them rarely infect adults.

Meanwhile, as Dr William Kitchen writes opposite, there is a disturbing push to use Covid to undermine academic selection. Mr Weir needs to resist that too.

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